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Removed Google Site maps and page count goes up

Discussion in 'Google Sitemaps' started by swapshop, Jun 26, 2006.

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  1. 1-script.com

    1-script.com Well-Known Member

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    #81
    Using Google XML Sitemaps really hurts your site. I'm not talking about what later became Webmaster Tools account - these tools are great (although a bit buggy ;) ). I'm talking about making your URLs available to Google in an easily digestible XML format which Googlebot does not deserve (figurative speech, of course).

    I was such a fool using Sitemaps since September 2005 and watching the number of indexed pages go from 500,000 to 3,500. Removed all the maps in October 2006 and number of indexed pages went to 50,000. Still not where it was before but much better.

    Thinking about it: why would you feed a list of URLs to a search engine that is reliant on links to rank the pages? This seems to screw up the algo or something, exaggerated by the fact that you all of the sudden make it look like a 500,000-page site appeared overnight! All these pages were there for the longest time but Googlebot had trouble accessing them and now all of a sudden there they are, let's mark them all as spam and throw them away.

    I would not use XML sitemaps at all (actually deleted all of mine) or at the very least use them with caution and only release parts at a time on a large site.
     
    1-script.com, Dec 12, 2006 IP
  2. mann3r

    mann3r Peon

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    #82
    thanks for this thread, i will try to experiment also in my site.
     
    mann3r, Dec 14, 2006 IP
  3. novaangel

    novaangel Guest

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    #83
    im going to remove my sitemaps in that case. I keep seeing my indexed pages de-indexed by the day and this hurts :(
     
    novaangel, Dec 15, 2006 IP
  4. CymaxStores

    CymaxStores Guest

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    #84
    This happened to us too, and was actually one of the reasons I registered to see if anyone knew what was going on. We had about 150,000 pages indexed and a pretty good first page position and then started using google site maps and our index shrunk to about 50,000 and we dropped to page 2/3 (with dancing). We took out sitemaps and now we're back up to nearly 100,000 and have our first page rank back.

    Is it a duplicate content penalty? Or is it that google assumes that if it has your sitemap it knows everything about your site and doesn't spider it "normally" anymore? Are sitemaps just a reverse way of indicating robots.txt?

    I'm not sure but we're definitely not using it, despite the fact that if it worked it could be pretty handy seeing as we have lots of page turnover.
     
    CymaxStores, Dec 19, 2006 IP
  5. evera

    evera Peon

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    #85
    I use sitemap since more than 3 months now, and indexed pages also dropped to like 10% of what it was before. But it didnt affect my SERPS or PR so i dont really care at the moment. I will give google some more time. Because i also made some optimisation on my robots.txt, so I'm not sure whether its from that or not. But its still funny that this happens, I mean you would expect it to go up.
    And Yahoo knows like 200 times more pages than Google :p
     
    evera, Dec 20, 2006 IP
  6. jacobs

    jacobs Banned

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    #86
    hi swap

    i dont think the removal of sitemap has affected ur inclusion, the pages of urs must have been included in the database. and it must have not been updated and in the mean while u removed the site map. and database updated...
    and in affect u r thinking that removing sitemap helped.

    if sitemap is there for making indexing fast how can it hamper indexing of pages it cant be the case....
     
    jacobs, Dec 21, 2006 IP
  7. syntax_error

    syntax_error Peon

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    #87
    I think removing sitemap doesnt cause a huge problems as i have removed a sitemap from a site still it showing all the pages and also getting about 1500 uniques a day from google only..:)
     
    syntax_error, Dec 27, 2006 IP
  8. Svoboda

    Svoboda Well-Known Member

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    #88
    I'm in the same boat as most of you. I run a steadily growing forum ran in vBulletin and everytime I submit a sitemap, I'll lose up to 66% of the pages from Google. If I delete my sitemap, I generally get most of my pages back overnight.

    It doesn't help/hurt my actual rankings, but my pages do disappear for whatever reason. For the time being, I've quit using sitemaps. I also agree with 1-script.com -- why should we do the work for search engines?
     
    Svoboda, Dec 30, 2006 IP
  9. DLGx

    DLGx Active Member

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    #89
    I submitted a sitemap for my myspace site the other day and now I've lost 8000 indexed pages and 100% of my traffic from google.

    Threads here on DP with my signature link is the best ranking pages I could find for the site.
     
    DLGx, Dec 31, 2006 IP
  10. reapr

    reapr Peon

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    #90
    I took down disabled site maps on one site and saw some improvement but I am not actually sure that was the problem. Anyone else?
     
    reapr, Jan 1, 2007 IP
  11. master_06

    master_06 Peon

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    #91
    I had the same experience also, from 225 before with sitemap on now, its 423 with sitemap removed. why is this so......ooohhh maddening!!!
     
    master_06, Jan 1, 2007 IP
  12. Richie_Ni

    Richie_Ni Illustrious Member

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    #92
    Umm,it seems that most of you think it's better not to have sitemaps.I'm going to give it a try.
     
    Richie_Ni, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  13. ddwebguru

    ddwebguru Banned

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    #93
    Hi Friends
    it's pretty interesting to read the -sitemap issue-
    i just submit sitemap & i am ready to see what happen
    but my query is why google say to submit xm-sitemap?
    and what about ROR sitemap?????????????

    web design seo India
     
    ddwebguru, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  14. cheetuh

    cheetuh Peon

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    #94
    just got rid of sitemap. i will tell results 2. i have 328 index pages pages. hope i get more. how much time do i need to see results?
     
    cheetuh, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  15. mann3r

    mann3r Peon

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    #95
    i have finished the experiment on one of my site from 700 indexed, returned to 343 indexed then i removed sitemap and now it came to a thousand plus indexed pages.
     
    mann3r, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  16. born2win

    born2win Well-Known Member

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    #96
    Huh so much difference on removing the sitemap. No wonder one of my websites index is too low compared to previous one.
     
    born2win, Jan 2, 2007 IP
  17. Forsh

    Forsh Well-Known Member

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    #97
    This thread has peaked my interest in my own sitemap problems. I figured (concept-wise) sitemaps would just be maps to your site URL's, and not be full of so many issues like this. :(
     
    Forsh, Jan 6, 2007 IP
  18. ainmohd

    ainmohd Peon

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    #98
    Sitemap is not my cup of tea. Neither coffee.

    If one's website is well structured, Google will crawl it. If it is terrible, Google won't bother to crawl with or without sitemap.
     
    ainmohd, Jan 7, 2007 IP
  19. malcolm1

    malcolm1 Prominent Member

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    #99
    Google webmaster tools are nowhere near perfect,but are very far from it.

    I can tell you that since i have updated my NEW sitemap (which now has 9000+ urls is being indexed like mad!)

    My first sitemap could only hold "1000 urls" (ror xml)which was slowing me down from being indexed and had not been updated in 4 months from all the catagory changes.

    Now something i never new that i found out is that there is a "limit 200" to how many sitemaps a website can have.
    Those who Add a sitemap to every page are hurting themselves as google can and will only take 200 sitemaps per site MAX, so if you have a website with 900 pages and you have a sitemap on every page then you just dogged yourself as its over kill and you are not helping but hurting your site.
    I cant remember how many urls 1 sitemap can hold but know that its alot.

    Go to google webmasters questions and the info is right thier for your viewing. you can start here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

    thx
    malcolm
     
    malcolm1, Jan 7, 2007 IP
  20. 1-script.com

    1-script.com Well-Known Member

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    #100
    You must be confusing 200 links to one sitemap with 200 sitemaps. There is no harm in having 900 pages link to the same sitemap. Also, I cannot think about a reason to only add one page to a sitemap which is what you are talking about sounds like. Ideally you should have one sitemap for your entire site. However, if you have more than 50,000 pages you are going to have to split your URLs into multiple XML files and then create one that points to all of those other ones and call that one your sitemap.
     
    1-script.com, Jan 7, 2007 IP
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